Dinoblade

Publisher: Team Spino LLC, Boltray Games

Developer: Team Spino LLC

Platform: Microsoft Windows

Price: $19.99

It all began with an animation of a Spinosaurus whirling a greatsword around. It was just a fun little side thing that a solo animator threw together...but the internet saw something it desperately wanted: the potential for a game. So, that animator learned how to develop games and set out to turn his fun little animation into a soulslike...though that's a debatable label. 

Enter Dinoblade, complete with the proverbial trembling cup of water. Since its release, the gaming world has been thoroughly taken with it.

But is it just memes? Do people only like it because its concept is objectively cool?

...

I'd say so...but there's also some fun to be had beneath the issues.

Also, full disclose: I haven't yet completed Dinoblade for reasons we'll get into.

For now, let's dive in.

In Dinoblade, you play as a young Spinosaurus who, while on the brink of death, forms a pact with an obviously evil English-speaking wraith of a dinosaur in exchange for power. From there, you set out on a quest to...consume souls, I suppose. Stories in soulslikes are typically on the vague side, and I've quite honestly never seen a story as vague as this one. So, that's all there is to say!

On the gameplay front, this is kind of a soulslike but not really. You don't drop your experience points upon death, enemies don't respawn at checkpoints (unless you choose to "rest" there, which there's no reason to do since you restore health and healing items just by interacting with those checkpoints), and each level is a self-contained thing with no organic flow into other levels. With that in mind, it would be better to call Dinoblade a challenging action game with some soulslike elements. 

The actual combat loop is a mixture of light and heavy attacks, special skills, parries, and dodges. These aspects are built upon a stamina management foundation, though your starting stamina is so abundant that you aren't likely to run low on it too often (if at all). 

Defeating enemies and bosses nets you experience points that can be put into health, strength (weapon damage), resonance (magic), or stamina. This can be done at any time, not just at checkpoints like in most soulslikes. Defeating bosses also grants you a skill point that can be used to unlock and improve four different skills (as well as a handful of passive benefits).

These skills cost a certain amount of resonance to use, and resonance is restored by pulling off parries...and you're going to want to use the skills, because they're how you're going to deal most of your damage (even if you put all your experience points into strength). 

As you might be able to infer from what I've said so far, this isn't a build-driven experience. You aren't crafting strength or magic builds, you're running an out-of-the-box strength and magic build, with your level-up decisions mostly driving minute changes. Health actually gets upgraded quite a bit if you choose to level it up, but in terms of how you deal with threats, the proportion of damage is largely going to be the same. 

With all of these details in mind, is the combat loop fun? Is it challenging like one would expect a soulslike to be?

As with most first time indie experiences, the answer is "yes, in spite of itself."

Let's start with the positives. 

The fist-in-the-air joy that naturally comes from completing difficult boss battles is well and truly accounted for here. The feeling of a perfect parry is also pretty solid. Not as solid as in Lies of P or this year's Stonemachia, but solid nonetheless. 

Plus, it's just cool to be a dinosaur with a sword going up against other weapon-wielding dinosaurs. They're also cool in incredibly stupid ways. 

A Triceratops swinging a flail attached to its horn. A Brontosaurus with a tree trunk. A T-Rex wielding a live Ankylosaurus. I defy you to tell me these don't sound like cool challenges to go up against! What's more, these bosses generally feel great to fight for all the reasons listed thus far.

But for every positive, there's at least one negative. 

When fighting basic enemies, you're going to have to move the camera out of the way a lot of the time because you're too big and the enemies are too small. And on the subject of basic enemies...they're a joke. I don't want enemies to be kicking my ass to the Tri-ass-ic period, but Dinoblade could arguably be called a boss rush with how little thought you'll spare the little guys on the way to the next big arena. 

While perfect parries feel great, the feedback just isn't there for imperfect ones. The sound effect isn't quite loud enough to signal you almost got the timing right, and the animation for parrying is just your character slightly tilting the sword at an angle. So you can't see or hear any difference. 

There's also little-to-no feedback for when you take damage. You're going to have a hard time even realizing you're taking damage unless you keep an eye on your health bar. 

Late-game bosses are also a problem for one major reason: camera tracking. Some of them simply move too fast for the camera to stay on them smoothly. They never go off screen, per-se, but the camera moves just the slightest bit too slowly...and it tries to be smooth, but it ends up being jarring instead. 

As for why I haven't yet beaten Dinoblade, the blame rests solely on the penultimate boss. This is for three reasons.

1): The camera. This boss' second phase is where that aforementioned camera tracking problem is at its worst. It's so bad that I've come close to getting motion sickness. I feel like I might be able to conquer that one of these days, but I really shouldn't have to.

2): Promised Consort Radahn terrain problems. Just like the final boss of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, this boss' first phase takes place on uneven terrain that causes attacks to be inconsistent in how they hit. It isn't quite as bad as in the Radahn fight, but it does cause you to take damage when you shouldn't.

And finally...

3): An overall difficulty spike. With this fight, I felt like I had to grind. Some soulslikes make you grind in order to get proper stats for a weapon, but few of them make you do so to survive. The spike in damage you take and damage the boss shrugs off is so drastically higher than prior bosses that the slight number increases felt more and more necessary. It isn't an organic spike. The developer clearly just didn't know how to ramp up the challenge in a balanced way. It's a first attempt from someone who only did animation before, so I get it...but I still have to report on my experiences. 

So, Dinoblade is rough in its gameplay, but make no mistake...there's still plenty of fun to be found if you can bear with some expected indie jank.

Sadly, the roughness is also present in Dinoblade's technical fidelity. While the framerate remained relatively stable throughout my time and while the soundtrack is excellent, very little else works. 

On a first launch attempt, it's going to take upwards of 10 minutes. And once it launches, you may very well get a glitch on the main menu that keeps you from clicking anything until you quit out and launch again. These issues didn't happen on subsequent launches, but they made for one hell of a negative first impression.

In combat, you'll constantly see enemies start to float high above the ground for a couple seconds, and key sound effects simply won't play for some of the more epic-looking boss attacks. Pair that with the lackluster gameplay feedback and you have an experience that feels awfully muted at times.

The dinosaur sounds themselves, however, never mute no matter how much I want them to. Enemy roars don't cancel themselves out if a second roar starts playing in the middle of the first one...and some bosses attack supremely fast, which makes this issue much more prevalent. 

Lastly, the game will freeze for around 10 seconds sometimes. This never signifies a crash, thankfully, but it always made me think it had crashed. 

This is a one-man studio's first game attempt on a fairly large scale. Some jank is to be expected. But even by that metric, there's a little too much wrong with this technical package to be excusable. 

Folks, if all you're looking for is a cool soulslike-adjacent game with cool dinosaurs doing cool things, boy are you in luck! Dinoblade has that in spades, and it legitimately never gets old to see the next idea the developer had. The combat loop, in spite of its flaws, is ultimately satisfying and will give you the same feeling of accomplishment you'd feel after beating any soulslike boss. I daresay that if you're in this hypothetical group of people, Dinoblade is damn near GOTY material.

However, the flaws are simply too many and the redeeming factors too few. Crucial audiovisual feedback, often the x-factor in creating epic-feeling experiences, isn't present. Every combat scenario aside from bosses feels like an afterthought. The camera will start to fail you right when the challenge is ramping up the most. The penultimate boss may very well be unbeatable for some because of that camera work. And from a technical standpoint there's not a lot the game does well.

I don't regret picking up Dinoblade. In fact, some aspects of it truly have shots of landing spots on this year's GOTY lists. But there's no universe in which the game itself lands anywhere close to the main one. 

Let us review:

General combat flaws and jank - 1.0

Penultimate boss issues - 1.0

Technical woes - 1.0

Currently unable to finish through no fault of my own - 1.0

The final score for Dinoblade is...

6.0/10 - Above Average